Everything is always in process. Flapping like a butterfly, the Network is watching and working on the Compassion Project. The First sharing economy was knowledge. A non-profit blog enabling the exploration and efficient sharing of information, thoughts, and opinion, regarding autism, cosmology, philosophy, politics, psychology, science, sociology, theology, and truth. "It is time to tell all."

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Monday, February 4, 2013

Why Do Countries Keep Listening to These Guys?

Credit Rating agencies are the slave-masters of present governments around the world, forcing them to serve the greed of investors rather than their people. Austerity is all about credit rating and borrowing to amke up for the tax shortfall created by low taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but mostly through the massive, sanctioned, and encouraged, tax evasion via offshore tax havens that our governments helped create, proving who they truly work for - their future employers when they become advisers, consultants, or lobbyists. The world's wealth is being locked up in these accounts and fake companies. Corporations are sitting on massive profits, just like their owners, refusing to invest in the society that makes it possible. They are traitors, investors are gamblers, and credit rating agencies are nothing but odds-makers. The world economy is being run as a casino.

The following is a re-post of an essay by Michael Enright broadcast on CBC's The Sunday Edition.

The damage done by credit rating agencies - Michael's essay

Sunday, February 3, 2013

If there is one thing that scares a banker more than a subpoena from the
Senate banking committee, it is a downgrade in the bank's credit
rating.The Big Three ratings agencies are like the Horsemen of the
Apocalypse for investors, municipalities, financial institutions,
insurance companies, banks, even national governments.

They make the ebola virus seem like a chocolate sundae.
When you see them coming, hide the children and family valuables in the
root cellar. Any downgrade from super terrific triple A, and Bay Street
gets a violent attack of the vapours.

This past week,
Moody's Investors Service downgraded, ever so slightly, the ratings of
Canada's largest banks. The stated reason was concern over volatility in
the housing market and a lot of blather that the banks are, "more
vulnerable to unpredictable downside risks facing the economy than in
the past."

The Big Three -- Moody's, Standard and Poor's and
Fitch -- control something like 90 per cent of the ratings market. Their
ratings are the single most important element in determining the value
of a bond or a company or a portfolio. Investors cling to their findings
like lint on Velcro. But leave us not forget that the credit raters got
just about everything wrong leading up to the 2008 economic collapse.

For
example, the thousands of residential mortgages rated triple and double
A by Standard and Poor's, more than 70 per cent were near or in default
by the end of that year. And Moody's kept pumping out good news about
Enron and didn't downgrade its value until the day before the company
collapsed.

Incidentally,
Matt Taibbi, the much feared and much respected financial writer for
Rolling Stone, calls Moody's, " the most whorishly corrupt ratings
company in modern history."

Since the 2008 meltdown, politicians
and others have voiced concern about the immense power of the companies.
In fact, the June 2010 G-20 meetings in Toronto ended with a communiqué
committing governments to reducing reliance on, "external ratings in
rules and regulations." That resolve lasted about eight seconds.

Who
are these companies that can make governments tremble? They are
unelected, anonymous oligarchs with more power than many financial and
political institutions.

It all started in 1909
when a man named John Moody began selling subscriptions to his reports
on the financial worthiness of bonds being sold to finance the building
of railways. He later expanded it to include electrical companies, and
ultimately, heavy industry.

Companies
employ a ratings agency to look at the books and give them a rating.
For this, they pay a hefty fee. The rating is an opinion, not a fact,
and the companies themselves seem to realize it's all a bunch of
flapdoodle. For example, S and P warns at the end of every rating that
the recipient, "should not rely on any credit rating or other opinion
contained herein in making any investment decision."

Governments
are starting to fight back, ever so tentatively. In the middle of
January, the European Parliament adopted a resolution which will in fact
restrict the operations of credit rating agencies. For countries like
Portugal, this is a god-send, because thanks to a lousy credit rating,
the government can't borrow and if it can't borrow it can't pay its
bills.

The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a
ten-member panel set up to determine the cause of the 2008 implosion,
found the credit rating agencies were complicit. Said the Commission's
report, "This crisis could not have happened without the rating
agencies. Their ratings helped the market soar and their downgrades
through 2007 and 2008 wreaked havoc across markets and firms."

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About Me

The Pündi are a race from my fantasy novels, the Continuum Chronicles, an exploration of spiritual evolution theory. Appearing like us, they are really child-sized aliens cursed by their own intelligence, trapped as observers unable to share their knowledge. They often develop an individual obsessive interest.

I write and publish, not selling anything, just trying to share ideas that might profit everyone. I aim not for originality but creativity, organizing what exists to generate new associations. I'm a writer with thick glasses and autism, familiar with the struggle for clarity. Novelist, researcher, internet activist, spiritual evolutionist, and process philosopher, I believe in democratic social capitalism with a well-regulated engine of sustainable markets. As a writer, I find that most blockages tend to be improvements trying to occur to me.